Mystery: A Seduction, a Strategy, a Solution by Jonah Lehrer

Author:Jonah Lehrer [Lehrer, Jonah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Psychology, Emotions, Social Science, popular culture, Social Psychology
ISBN: 9781501195891
Google: 2M8DEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2021-08-17T23:49:09.491811+00:00

The Mystery of Desire

In 1912, Sigmund Freud wrote an obscure paper about sexual impotence. He wrote about impotence because it was an extremely common affliction: “apart from anxiety in all its many forms,” it was the condition that he was most frequently asked to treat.33 For these patients, the sex organs refused to perform under certain conditions, even though there was nothing wrong with their physical function. The failure was in the mind.

Freud referred to this as “psychical impotence.” While entire sections of his paper now feel outdated and obsolete—Freud spends a lot of time worrying about the incestuous fixations of the unconscious—the medical issue he identified is still extremely prevalent.34 According to the Massachusetts Male Aging Study, 52 percent of men between the ages of 40 and 70 suffer from episodes of impotence.35 Even young men are not immune: according to a study of more than 9,000 Swiss men between the ages of 18 and 25, 30 percent have experienced at least one episode of impotence.36

What accounts for this epidemic of impotence? Freud’s greatest insight occurred as he considered less severe cases, those patients still capable of performing the physical act but incapable of enjoying it. According to Freud, their lack of pleasure wasn’t due to a lack of love; these people were often deeply attached to their partners. They just didn’t want to have sex with them. “Where they love they do not desire, and where they desire they cannot love,” he wrote.

For Freud, psychical impotence revealed the tragic conflict at the center of adult relationships. We crave the adventure of romance, the kind of intense desire that accompanies flirting and courtship. It’s a desire rooted in mystery—we are still learning about our partner, discovering her pleasures, mapping his moods. All those secrets make for good sex.

If we are lucky, however, this initial uncertainty will eventually give way to the security of attachment. We’ll come to rely on the relationship, finding safety in the predictable comforts of flannel pajamas and Netflix on the couch. Such are the unintended consequences of intimacy—it often leads to unromantic habits, fixed routines that remove the risk from a relationship. Before long, we stop closing the bathroom door.

Freud believed that the conflict between love and desire was an inescapable fact of life.IV Lasting passion was impossible. Marriage meant a renouncement of romance. Our best hope was to avoid neuroses and divorce.

In recent years, however, many psychoanalysts and psychologists have come to believe that Freud was too pessimistic. They’ve discovered that many couples experience lasting sexual attraction, even though they’ve had sex thousands of times.37 In a sense, these relationships violate the law of habituation, which holds that repetition ruins pleasure, and that our nerves get bored by the familiar.

How do these couples do it? When the psychoanalyst Stephen Mitchell revisited Freud’s essay on impotence, he began with the observation that sexual experience is inherently private, the most opaque pleasure of all. “Although it is one of our most common experiences, none of us knows quite what sex is like for anyone else,” Mitchell writes.

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